They turned from the night and sat opposite me, their eyes shining.
They said, “This is what you’ve brought back into my life, Andrea: that refreshing sense of uncertainty.”
The preliminaries, introducing me to the Brachiators as a New Ghost who wished to taste Life, were fast and easy.
Securing me was a nightmare. My limbs rebelled at the very idea of trusting my life to a few roots and vines and safety cables, and more than once froze rather than submit. More than once the Porrinyards assured me that there was no shame in giving up on the very idea. I considered listening to them when they insisted on making me promise to signal at the first sign of an emergency.
But I said nothing, and soon found myself clinging to the Uppergrowth with all four limbs. The roots and vines were slack enough to permit some mobility. I had inserted my arms and legs through the places loose enough to accommodate them, hooked my ankles around a low-hanging loop, and found branches thick enough to provide handholds. Although the Porrinyards advised me that most of Gibb’s indentures preferred to do this facing the Uppergrowth, because that was the orientation of the Brachiators themselves, I insisted on being positioned with my back to the world’s ceiling and my face to the clouds.
I did not feel any safer when the Porrinyards, standing together on the cargo bed, strung a support cable across my waist or even when they looped another, thicker band around my chest. Anchored deep within the multiple layers of vines, they supported the bulk of my weight, freeing my arms in case I needed them, and preventing my limbs from seizing in reaction to what would have been agonizing strain. My mind appreciated the further safeguards against falling, but my gut considered them illusory protections at best.
The storm clouds below me were so very, very hungry.
I was still struggling to get my breath under control when the Porrinyards said, “Andrea? There are a couple of other things you need to know.”
Among them was just how stupid I was to invite this insane situation. “Go ahead.”
The Porrinyards each rested a protective hand on one of my shoulders. “Most people are a little afraid of heights. Mild acrophobia is healthy. But extreme, uncontrollable acrophobia is a different beast entirely. Many extreme acrophobes are frightened of heights, not because they see those heights as dangerous, but because they don’t trust themselves that close to an opportunity to jump. They see themselves surrendering to impulse. It’s not the fear of heights, in other words, but the fear of impulse that paralyzes them.”
I considered how easy it would be to just loosen the protective cables and plunge, and found the thought, horrific as it was, much too attractive. “Now you tell me.”
“If I did not consider you currently in control of yourself, I would not be leaving you here.”
I bit rising hysteria. “I hope you guessed right.”
“Me too. You’re very beautiful.”
My calm failed, overwhelmed by the distance between me and the storm clouds far below. “S-so are you.”
They displayed a pair of dazzling white smiles. “I look forward to overcoming your resistance.”
Dammit, this wasn’t fair. “Th-that might be difficult. I’m not the kind to get talked into anything.”
“I have advantages,” they said. “I outnumber you.”
Whereupon they fell into crouches, steadied themselves within the skimmer’s specific gravity, and with a wave, sped off, taking both the light and my last chance to back down.
It was stupid to feel fear. Fear was nothing but the body’s involuntary response to perceived threats. Fear increased heartbeat, respiration, and perspiration; fear clouded the mind and paralyzed the limbs, and I’m going to die wasn’t subject to logical arguments about its counterproductivity.
Right now the single most persuasive image in my mind involved a sudden rip in the Uppergrowth. Let’s say, a few hairline tears at a spot already weakened by Brachiator claws, then strained to the breaking point by my own involuntary movements, spreading farther as the cell walls ruptured and the increased straub pulled the wounds still wider I’m going to die becoming a lightning-shaped zigzag Oh, Juje and an entire section of vines ripping loose all at once, spilling me into the same abyss that had claimed Santiago Shut up and just how far could I fall, really, before I felt the press of wind against my face and knew there was no hope? A meter? Two? Three?
I closed my eyes.
I’m going to die.
But that meant nothing, too, because we were all going to die, and every breath of air I managed to wrest from the universe was one more the nightmares of my childhood had failed to deny me. When I breathed it was an act of defiance. When I breathed it was a victory. When I breathed it was
Oh, dammit.
My last meal came up, spilling from my lips in a great volcanic comet.
It was one of the reasons I’d insisted on being secured face-down. People who vomit while secured in a face-up position have a nasty habit of choking to death. At least this way, if death came, it wouldn’t be messy and stupid.
Or at least not messy.
I wondered how far the vomitus had fallen. A few hundred meters? More? Was it still one coherent mass or had the wind separated it into—
Enough of that. Not helpful. Concentrate already. Banish the fear.
I thought of an imprisoned little girl, fighting off the effects of the inaudible sublims her keepers played to keep her docile, wanting to smash her fists against the walls but overcoming the rage and the fear and vowing to survive on her own terms.
There was no visible difference between that darkness and the darkness I faced now. I knew what the darkness hid.
But then, I’ve known since Bocai.
The long minutes went by, my breath slowing, my phobic reactions giving way to a kind of vague distress.
Have you ever spent a protracted period of time among a species not your own? I have. On Bocai, they had been vast extended family. In other places, they had been enemies, allies, or assignments. Here they were part of the landscape. I could smell the musty scent of their fur, and hear the soft rumble of their breath, and detect something of their personalities in the way they sighed and moaned and shifted position all around me. I could sense the rhythm of their strange, topsy-turvy lives and the connection they shared with their surroundings every second of every day. I could even sense their feelings toward me, the distasteful intruder in their midst: strange, alien, possibly even foul-smelling, so completely at odds with everything they considered normal. I could just imagine their reaction to being told that the human beings aboard One One One were here to help them. They couldn’t find the news heartening. What would they feel instead? Confusion? Amusement? Horror? Disgust? Rage? Malice? Maybe even something different from all of that, something that appeared on no human spectrum? Maybe anything but comfort. That, they wouldn’t feel. They called us Ghosts, after all, and Ghosts have always been incapable of putting the haunted at ease.
The truth was, whatever else may have been involved here, the AIsource had played a practical joke on us. They had arranged for our ideals to lead us into a world where our ideals were just plain irrelevant, a world whose inhabitants we would be honor-bound to help even though they got along fine if just left alone.
We considered them owned, but they had no frame of reference to measure freedom. We considered them prisoners, but they couldn’t live anywhere except with their captors. And we considered them slaves, but their only labor was to do what was natural to them. All the debates were just abstractions to those who actually had to live it: less relevant, even, than subtle discussions of color to creatures born blind. And whatever mazes they were driven through, whatever great dramas they played out for AIsource amusement, were likely destined to remain just as opaque to us. Our two races were like two parades marching down the same street to the same drumbeat, blind to one another until the moment of collision.